Barrie in Love IV

Barrie in Love IV

After the death of the Davies boys, Barrie asked himself if anyone is murdered accidentally? A boy who is murderable is surely a boy who in a profound if hidden way, desires to be murdered.

Is it the misshapen form of Peter Pan that gives certain indications of Barrie’s pagan inclinations toward such ultimate realizations?

Barrie’s glorification of the pagan world of nature and of himself as a god of that world is parodied by Barrie’s inhuman willfulness. Many see him as the rock-bottom of all life.

Unfeeling, stoic, Barrie cares about nothing except his work, he makes not the slightest attempt to be at at one with anything. He exists a "pure, unconnected will" in a stunted body.

Peter Pan and Captain Hook are beings that excite Barrie to disgusted fury because he is finally all that he has imagined for himself—the subordination of all spontaneity, the triumph of "the forbidden" in Victorian society.

These are fearful images, and what has Barrie to set against them but the embrace of a boy and a pirate, a visionary transfiguration of the individual by forbidden love? Before such an experience of love, the straight world seems ephemeral.